First life

"Life as we know it, in its simplest imaginable form, could not have formed by chance. 1 (#C997)

Here are the chances for a small, 100-unit polypeptide (protein). Most proteins in life are greater than 100 units. 2 Every property listed is true of all known modern life. And, as Stephen C. Meyer wrote, “Molecular biologists have estimated that a minimally complex single-celled organism would require between 318,000 and 562,000 base pairs of DNA to produce the proteins necessary to maintain life.” 3

To gain a perspective on these odds, click here. These numbers do not begin to address the odds that these polypeptides come together as actual life.

Debate

Evolutionist: The first life was a single, self-replicating molecule.

Evolutionist: Nucleic-Acid First Theory: The first life was a self-replicating nucleic acid molecule

Response: This is not possible due to error catastrophe (where the error rate meets or exceeds one per organism per generation). Since the first life could not have had all the error-checking of modern life, its error rate was probably 10% (1 in 10) and no less than 1% (1 in 100). 8 To avoid error catastrophe, then, the molecule would have to be, at the most, 100 units long.

However, 100 units is not enough to allow for error-checking capabilities, leading to a “catch-22” situation. The molecule could never get greater than 100 units without an error checking system, and it could not get the error checking system without becoming larger than 100 units.

Evolutionist: Protein First Theory: The first life was a self-replicating protein

Evolutionist: Crystalline Clay First Theory: The first life was a self-replicating crystalline clay molecule

Response: This theory lacks evidence to support it, making it purely speculative, not science.

Evolutionist: Biochemistry is not random. Therefore, these probabilities are invalid.

Response: First, we are dealing with odds so unlikely that even if we increased the odds by ten, a hundred, a thousand, or even a million, billion, or trillion times, they would still be so small they would be impossible. Thus, even if the non-randomness were favorable to life, it would not solve odds this small.

Second, if biochemistry were not random, and if life formed once non-randomly, then we would expect biochemistry to be predictable. In other words, life should arise every time that the conditions are right (e.g., in lab experiments). But life doesn’t. If biochemistry is not “random,” then we could safely conclude that life will never form, since it has not formed in our lab experiments. (As a side note, randomness is more of a shorthand expression for complex interactions. It does not supersede the laws of physics.)

Third, there is an uneven distribution of randomness, meaning some combinations are more likely than others. However, this would actually tend to hurt evolutionary odds even more. To illustrate, imagine a monkey at a typewriter. We can calculate the odds that he will type out one full sentence. However, the monkey will probably not act 100% randomly in the way we calculate. Rather, he may jump up and down on the keys or press a key over and over. This makes the odds of him typing out a coherent sentence even worse! A similar problem faces biochemistry.

Evolutionist: The first life was fundamentally unlike modern life. Therefore, these probabilities are invalid.

Response: First, this is a faith position. We have never seen life without the properties listed above (there are actually many other properties 10 as well).

Second, evolutionists have used the biologic universals as evidence for evolution in the first place. If the first life did not contain these universals, we would expect some life today not to have them, either (if its ancestors branched away before the development of these properties). 11

Evolutionist: These calculations don’t take into account the long ages of the earth.

Response: Actually, they do. There have been “only” about \( 4.3\times10^{20} \) milliseconds (max) since the big bang, and “only” \( 10^{80} \) atoms in the universe. When we speak of odds like \( 10^{200} \), we completely dwarf the long ages of the earth. See a perspective on chance here.

Evolutionist: These calculations don’t take into account the number of test cases. There would be countless test cases going on all the time, not just one.

Response: These calculations do take that into account. Again, even the number of milliseconds since the big bang multiplied by the number of atoms yields “only” about \( 10^{100} \), which is nothing when compared to numbers like \( 10^{160} \) or larger.

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Meyer, S. C. (2013). Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life And the Case for Intelligent Design. New York: HarperOne.

Notes

Rhodes, 2012, p. 132: “Does ‘the simplest creature on Earth,’ as John Sepkoski asks, ’embody a chain of causes each so unlikely that it takes a cosmos, with its billions of planets, to permit it even once?’ We do not know. We cannot, as yet, even speculate.” ↩

ReMine, 1993, p. 82: “Functional proteins from known life are roughly a hundred to a thousand units in length. We will take 100 units as the minimum length likely to give a biologically functional protein. This assumption gives an advantage to evolution, since most of life’s proteins are much longer than 100 units.” ↩

Meyer, 2013, p. 163: … “Molecular biologists have estimated that a minimally complex single-celled organism would require between 318,000 and 562,000 base pairs of DNA to produce the proteins necessary to maintain life. More complex single cells might require upwards of a million base pairs of DNA. Yet to assemble the proteins necessary to sustain a complex arthropod such as a trilobite would need orders of magnitude more protein-coding instructions. By way of comparison, the genome size of a modern arthropod, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, is approximately 140 million base pairs.” ↩

ReMine, 1993, p. 87: “Modern organisms have an error rate of approximately 1 in 10^10 due to a three stage process that requires specialized enzymes. The first process aids in selecting which of the four nucleotides is added onto the daughter strand. The second process involves proof-reading enzymes and the third process takes place after synthesis and corrects errors that escape the first two processes. But the first organism could contain none of these processes, so the error rate was approximately 1 in 10 and certainly greater than 1 in 100.” ↩

ReMine, 1993, p. 93: “[Evolutionists] postulate the earthly existence of life bearing no resemblance to anything known today: life without DNA, life without predominantly left-handed amino acids, life without predominantly a-bonded amino acids, life without the twenty proteinous amino acids, life without ribosomes, life without the genetic code, life without RNA, life without the bi-layered phosphatide construction of cell membranes, life without any membrane of any kind, life without any enxyme known today, life without protein, … the list goes on.” ↩

ReMine, 1993, p. 94: “Origin-of-life theorists rejected the biologic universals, while main-stream evolutionists claimed biologic universals as a major prediction of evolution. This contradiction existed for decades, yet it was successfully hidden. The contradiction went unnoticed because evolutionists artificially separated the origin of life from its subsequent evolution — as though the two were unrelated problems.” ↩

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